By Jeffery Marino
Another month, another record: In June, the median sale price for a home in NELA hit a new high of $1.02 million — a 19% annual increase over June 2020 and the highest year-over-year price jump since September 2018.
Which is to say, the NELA residential real estate market is showing no signs of slowing down. To see the individual home sales in your NELA neighborhood, click here.
Behind the high prices is low inventory, which leads to competition among buyers. Overall, inventory fell in June by 24% compared to a year ago.
The dearth of houses for sale is partly due to a decades-long lack of new construction.
Another reason is that buyers are snatching up houses as soon as they hit the market, leaving scant inventory to carry over from month to month.
The result: Inventory is even lower now than in the very low inventory environment a year ago when potential home sellers, spooked by the pandemic, kept their homes off the market.
In a hot market like NELA’s, the lower the inventory, the higher the sales-to-list ratio, a measure of the asking price for a home versus the sale price. The ratio in June was 110%, meaning homes sold for 10% over the asking price on average. It was the third straight month of year-over-year increases and a new record in data going back to 2012.
No doubt about it, now is a good time to be a home seller. And as long as prices keep rising, as they appear poised to do, it’s a good time to be a buyer, too.
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Jeffery is a seasoned data journalist and has covered the California real estate market for over a decade.
